


Mesmerized

by NOT_TOWA_WAKASA



Category: Date or Die (Video Game)
Genre: F/M, Hypnotism, Magic Tricks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-01
Updated: 2017-04-01
Packaged: 2018-10-13 17:48:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,882
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10518759
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NOT_TOWA_WAKASA/pseuds/NOT_TOWA_WAKASA
Summary: Hero and Mesmer are stuck with nothing to do, so Mesmer decides to show off a bit.





	

**Author's Note:**

> For future reference, this was written before the full game was released.

* * *

A bedroom’s worth of furniture had been stacked against the door, forming a small mountain of chairs and drawers. Save for what was screwed to the wall, the room was stripped bare.

At the time, it seemed like the obvious thing to do, just barricade the door and wait - of course, what hadn’t occurred to Hero until it was already done is that there was a whole facility’s worth of tools, all stacked up against what she and Mesmer could find in a single room.

It wasn’t a concern that she voiced - there was nothing to be done about it, after all - but rather than sit in a comfortable corner while she bored herself to death, she sat with her ear against the wall, holding her breath to a whisper.

— Not that it did much good, with Mesmer pacing back and forth, shoes padding away on the hard floor without a care.

 "What are you doing?"

Mesmer looked back at her over his shoulder, hands in the pile that had been made when the drawers had been dumped. “... Uh. Nothing, really, I’m just looking.”

“You don’t seem… _appropriately_ worried about this.”

“Are you kidding? We’re stuck in this murder game thing -”

“And you’re not freaking out about it!” Hero strained, her throat tightening just as she’d realized that she’d raised her voice. “It’s just… weird that you don’t seem nervous.”

“It’d be exhausting to just… sit and worry, you know?” He looked back at her, and then sat back down with his pile of junk. “There’s no point in it, anyway. As long as we stay in here, no amount of worrying will change the situation.”

A nervous lump in the back of her throat broke free in a shaky sigh. They were on the same page, Hero knew, but it was frustrating that Mesmer could just... _deal_ with it so easily. “... I _know_ that.”

“So we should just chill, yeah? Besides, I feel like the others must’ve had the same idea.”

Hero had seen the other contestants. They were strangers, but they all seemed… _decent_ . Some were more rough than others, but none of them looked like murderers. It was bizarre - the idea that they would just up and start killing each other because some asshole told them to. Because of some _game_.

“Heyy, look what I found!” Mesmer’s sing-song voice edged himself back into Hero’s periphery -

Holding a standard 52-card deck.

“He put cards in here? God, that’s so… fitting?”

Mesmer was already dumping the cards into his hands, shuffling them in smooth movements as naturally as he breathed.

It was a familiar sight. Mesmer was older now, they both were, but - “I remember - I remember when we were kids, when you’d come to me with one of those decks, so excited to show me some trick you’d learned. You had this smile, like you were king of the block.”

Mesmer’s cheeks flushed, but he smiled through it - and Hero remembered that about him, too - “Well, _I_ remember you liking my tricks,” he returned, springing the deck from one hand to the other with flourish. “You could never figure them out, so it was an easy way for me to impress you.”

“... Speaking of which,” he continued, “want to see some now?”

“What, a card trick?”

“Yeah. I’m not sure if you know this about me, but I’m a pretty good at these.” He was already rolling his sleeves up to his elbows, speaking with a cocky tone. “If I do say so myself.”

“God, you big dork,” Hero laughed, “- sure, show me what you got.”

“O-kay!” Mesmer exclaimed, and plucked two cards from the deck. “A four of clubs and a king of diamonds,” Mesmer clarified, before stacking them together and taking them between his fingers. “This is simple, I’m just going to bend them in half, and half again,” and the cards were bent back and forth until they were creased into quarters. “Now -” Mesmer tore the stack in half through the center, before gathering them together and tearing them again.

Mesmer flashed the torn pieces together, like a miniature hand. “I think I know where this is going,” Hero grinned. “Yep! But see, this is the hard part, I’ve kind of jumbled them up,” Mesmer continued, and split the pieces between his two hands. “Let me just…” He rubbed either hand of cards up the bared skin of the opposite forearm, and just as the second hand was being pulled down - the quarters were snapped back together into a single card.

“What the -” Hero startled, eyes going wide for a moment - before she crumpled back, and rubbed her temples. Mesmer gave a honeyed smirk, too pleased with himself. He folded the card back and forth, as he had in the beginning, and just as he moved to pull it taut, the second card snapped out of it. He flipped them both over, revealing the same four of clubs and king of diamonds, creased over but whole.

“That - that was pretty fucking cool -” Hero breathed, not knowing she had her hand over her mouth. “How does that work?!”

“It’s a secret~” Mesmer said, but passed the two cards over to Hero for her to inspect. They were still warm from Mesmer’s handling, but also very neat, minus the creases down the center. None of the corners were scuffed, no tears on the design.

He was still like this. He was smoother than before, more practiced - but he was still just as proud of his talent as he’d always been. When Hero saw Mesmer on the television, performing some of the some of the same tricks he had for her as children but for hundreds of people, she thought _of course_ \- it was something he was good at, so _of course_ he would make a career out of it. It was what _you_ _did._

But it was more than that. Or maybe it was less - Mesmer _enjoyed_ magic.

“You know,” Mesmer started, sitting back on his heels, “I can do more than just card tricks.”

“You’re such a show off,” Hero laughed.

“It works out for me.” As if to demonstrate his point, he span the cards back into the pack with a showy twirl. “But if you’d like, I could show you something like… _hypnosis_.”

“You mean, like, mind control?”

“No, no - well, I could, but that’s more of a stage thing. It would be boring with just us. Besides being, like, an obviously bad idea in this situation.”

He was right. There was a level of understanding between them here, something they’d gained in their small time here - but it wasn’t _trust_ , more like… an agreement. An agreement that they wouldn’t literally stab each other in the back.

They were friendly. There was something about Mesmer that put Hero at ease - the way he’d makes light of shitty situations so easily, the way he spoke with her so familiarly - but that was also terrifying in it’s own way.

“I, um - you shouldn’t worry about it if you’re not okay with it, it was just an idea.”

“No -” Hero interrupted, and rubbed the awkwardness she felt from it against her the back of her neck, “- I want to see it. This is… fun? What is it, even? What you want to show me.” Her mouth is pulled into a reflexive something, and she tries desperately to swallow it down.

“Aha, well,” he started, launching off of his heels, “there’s no setup needed, or anything like that. I can do it anywhere, as long as I have your attention.”

“Gosh, I don’t know if I can manage that.”

“No worry! I’m an expert at this. Soon, I’ll have you _mesmerized_!”

Hero made a face somewhere between a smile and a deep, visceral pain. “That’s awful! I regret agreeing to this.”

“No, no -” he laughed, and set down in front of her. “Here - you’re with me, right?”

“I’m here, Mesmer,” she nodded.

“Okay. First things first, you’re going to close your eyes.”

“So bossy,” she returned, but followed suit.

“I want you to, instead of thinking about how things look, think about how things feel, how they sound. What can you hear going on in this room?”

Hero strained her ears. If it wasn’t enough that she had no idea where this place was, she figured that it was also sound-proofed. She couldn’t hear anything like cars going by, or tweeting birds, or wind - the facility was a completely isolated soundscape.

She _could_ hear something in the walls - the sound of pipes in use. She recognized it as a water. “... In the walls, there’s water going down a pipe somewhere.”

“Good. What about the temperature, what’s it like in here?”

“It’s… pretty well regulated in here, it’s not cold or hot. Kind of stuffy in this room.”

“What do you feel right now?”

“... The floor is hard.”

“On your skin. Can you feel your hair on your neck?”

“Oh. I -” The reminder flooded her with sensations she’d forgotten from familiarity. She could feel her coarse curls brushing against the back of her neck, and could make out where each lock ended.

“Think about your clothes, how much your jacket weighs on your shoulder, and how that feels. What the fabric of your dress feels like.”

She could. Everything felt like fresh and sudden, heightened sensations filling her mind with images of the space she carved out in the room, her own weight, where Mesmer sat and the pile of furniture to her right.

“Now, I want you think about the _burning heat in your palms_ , and -”

A fire seated deep into the nerves of Hero’s hands, burning like it’d always been there, sprouting up into her digits, to the pads of her fingers -

She opened her eyes and threw her hands out. “Agh! God, that’s freaky -” she brought them together and tried to rub out the sensation furiously.

“Haha, you broke it!” Mesmer laughed. Quickly, the burning faded, leaving only a tingling where it had been.

“That’s so _weird_ , my hands just started heating up out of nowhere -” She became aware again of the space around her. That Mesmer was right in front of her, how close their faces were, and his earnest grin he wore.

… And her wild reaction at the illusion - and there was a new kind of embarrassed heat in her face.

“You ended it so early!” he said, but was clearly painfully happy with himself, twirling a lock of hair around his finger.

“How could I not?!”

“You’d make a terrible assistant,” Mesmer laughed, “But you were really cute like that, you know?”

Her ears were burning, and that same involuntary pulling of her face came back. Hero was painfully aware that she couldn’t hide it. “Ugh.”

There was something incredibly fucked up about having fun at a time and place like this, with the Host’s cameras in every corner of every room. When the sense of urgency left them, the absence of it came and filled the void, bringing with it it’s own anxiety. It seemed banal, but banality in this place was impossible, and they both knew this.

But even then, the simplicity of an _I enjoy this please don’t stop whatever this is_ was welcome. There was a lot of time to kill.

**Author's Note:**

> I've read through the pilot a bunch of times, but I'm still not really sure how their "childhood friend" thing worked? I went with "they were friends as children but ended on an ugly note." I also thought the line given by the Host when Mesmer is selected as Hero’s enemy (something along the lines of “even his honesty is dishonest”) was interesting and tried to account for it.


End file.
